Rémi Grobe
So I’m supposed to be what? I asked her. — An associate. — An associate? I’m not a lawyer. A journalist, Odile said. — Like your husband? — Why not? — With what newspaper? — Something serious. Les Échos. Nobody up there reads that. Later, when we got to Wandermines, Odile wanted me to park the car in a narrow side street behind the church square. But it’s raining, I said. — I don’t want to arrive in a BMW. — That’s the wrong attitude. You’ll arrive in the same kind of car the boss’s lawyer has, it’s perfect. She hesitated. She’d opted for an adorable look, heels higher than usual, power haircut. I said, you’re very chic, you’re la Parisienne, you think they want some left-wing activist type with clogs on her feet showing up to represent them? All right, she said. I believe the main reason she agreed was the rain. I parked on the square and went around the car holding an umbrella. She got out. Small, wrapped in a coat, a scarf tied around her neck, carrying a stiff purse and a briefcase full of folders. I started to have a feeling, I mean a real feeling, at that moment. As we were getting out of the car, in Wandermines, in the rain. The influence of place on our emotions doesn’t get its just due. Without warning, certain nostalgias rise to the surface. People change their natures, as in old tales. There in front of the church, which was half hidden in mist, in the square with the red brick buildings and the fried food vendor’s shack, I saw the asbestos victims’ leading lawyer as a little girl, unsure of herself, who laughed — I adore her laugh — when she recognized the group there to welcome her. Amid that fellowship dressed in Sunday clothes and hastening to the mayor’s office to escape the raindrops, as I held Odile’s arm to help her cross the slippery square, I felt the catastrophe of sentiment. There had never been any question of that sort of foolishness before. I know her husband, she knows the women who pass in and out of my life. There’s never been anything at stake between us except sexual distraction. I said to myself, you’re having a fade-out moment, my boy, it will pass. In the municipal hall, Odile spoke before three hundred people, the workers and their families. At the end of her talk, everybody applauded. The president of the victims’ association told her, you just filled three buses for the demonstration next Thursday. Odile said in my ear, I was born to be a politician. Her face was beet-red. I nearly told her that politics requires greater composure, but I didn’t say anything. We left the general assembly hall for another hall, where a banquet was held. Three o’clock in the afternoon came and we still hadn’t made it past the sparkling wine aperitifs. A plump woman of about sixty, wearing a pleated skirt, directed the service. There was a sound system that had been cutting-edge in the 1980s. I struck up an acquaintance with a former worker in asbestos removal and demolition, a guy with pleural cancer. He told me about his working life, about cutting up the corrugated sheets, about grinding or sanding pipes with sandpaper and no protection. He described the asbestos room, the dust. He told me the asbestos was delivered to them in drums and they’d play with it like snow. I saw Odile dancing the Madison with several widows (she’s the one who said